Culture – Page 12 – Into the Woods

How reason propels the arc of justice

The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress. Peter Singer. Princeton University Press. Second edition, 2011; first published 1981. 208 pages.

Peter Singer, born in 1946, is one of our most progressive moral philosophers. In 1975, he published Animal Liberation. For years, he has argued for altruism, from utililitarian principles. In 2015, he published The Most Good You Can Do, which holds that we have a duty to, at the very least, donate money to help alleviate global poverty.

Singer looks largely to David Hume (1711-1776) for the roots of his utilitarian philosophy. Singer’s concern in this book is how it was that moral progress has continued since the time of Hume, as rights were extended to slaves, to women, and even, to a much lesser degree, to animals. Singer calls this the expanding circle. I would call it the arc of justice.

It is reason, Singer believes, that leads to this ever-expanding circle of rights. Applying reason to rights and justice, Singer writes, is like stepping onto an escalator. Once you take the first step, you must ride all the way to the top; there is no way on the way up to get off. There is no reason at all, Singer believes, why animals should not have the same rights as human beings. And Singer is entirely open to the idea, somewhere much higher up on the escalator, that plants have rights, as does the land, a mountain, or a river. On that subject, his sympathy is with Aldo Leopold.

Singer, in this book though, gets into a serious quarrel with the sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, who died in 2021. Singer entirely accepts Wilson’s case that our “moral intuitions” including altruism have their roots in our human evolution as social animals. But Singer believes that Wilson was entirely wrong in claiming that these moral intuitions are the last word in moral philosophy, with no moral progress possible beyond what is innate in our instincts. We are reasoning beings as well as social beings, Singer argues, and it is reason that leads us up the escalator to an ever-expanding and increasingly altruistic concept of rights and duties.

Singer makes a strong objection to Wilson’s criticism of John Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1971). Wilson wrote that Rawls’ concept of justice (which is of course based on reason) may be “an ideal state for disembodied spirits,” but is “in no way explanatory or predictive with reference to human beings.” Singer does not discuss Rawls in this book except to defend Rawls against Wilson. But I think it would be safe to assume that Singer has no argument with Rawls. As I’ve mentioned here in the past, Rawls — having stepped onto the escalator of reason — does not attempt in A Theory of Justice to extend to animals his concept of justice as fairness. But as I read Rawls, he almost begs someone else to do that work.¹

Why am I so interested in moral philosophy? I would argue that we all should be interested in moral philosophy, as a means of holding our ground and preserving our confidence in an era in which religion and politics increasingly have gone insane, actually belittling the effort toward moral progress as “woke,” using insulting terms such as “social justice warrior.” Religion and right-wingery have always worked to block moral progress. But in the present era they are increasingly open to using violence and corrupting our institutions to gain power and cruelly turn back the clock to a far more primitive time.

Singer paraphrases Leviticus 25:39-46, which I quote here from the Christian Standard translation:

“If your brother among you becomes destitute and sells himself to you, you must not force him to do slave labor. Let him stay with you as a hired worker or temporary resident; he may work for you until the Year of Jubilee. Then he and his children are to be released from you, and he may return to his clan and his ancestral property. They are not to be sold as slaves, because they are my servants that I brought out of the land of Egypt. You are not to rule over them harshly but fear your God. Your male and female slaves are to be from the nations around you; you may purchase male and female slaves. You may also purchase them from the aliens residing with you, or from their families living among you – those born in your land. These may become your property. You may leave them to your sons after you to inherit as property; you can make them slaves for life. But concerning your brothers, the Israelites, you must not rule over one another harshly.”

Though that passage is more than 2,000 years old, it is shocking that, until the Enlightenment, with the church unchallenged, the arc of justice moved so slowly. It was not until 150 years ago that owning and inheriting slaves was outlawed in this country. And now the heirs of the Confederacy² are reasserting themselves, actually claiming moral superiority for themselves and ridiculing resistance as “woke.”

What does one say to people like that? More important, what does one do to resist them? I return again and again to the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by the Nazis in 1945:

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice; we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

But how?

Notes:

1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 448.

2. Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, 2020.

Young lives, ruined by Hitler

Generation War, a German production, 2013

We Americans have seen many movies about World War II, but we probably haven’t seen a movie about how the war looked from a German perspective. Generation War is hard to watch, as the misery and disillusion of the Germans escalate year after awful year. The stories of the five young people in Generation War make it clear that the lies behind the war were as cruel as the war itself, adding existential agony to the physical agony.

The series is in three parts, each about an hour and a half long. The cast is charismatic. It’s a beautiful period piece, shot in Germany, Lithuania, and Latvia.

Generation War can be streamed on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

The epistemology of derp

Paul Krugman’s column today is about crypto currency, “Crypto Is Crashing. Where Were the Regulators?” But my subject here isn’t crypto currency. Rather, it’s the many, many ways in which people allow themselves to be deceived, and the many, many ways in which people try to deceive us.

As for how people allowed themselves to be deceived about crypto currency, Krugman writes (the italics are mine): “The way I see it, crypto evolved into a sort of postmodern pyramid scheme. The industry lured investors in with a combination of technobabble and libertarian derp.”

That started me thinking about derp. It’s a beautiful word that almost defines itself. Krugman uses the word fairly often, probably because economic derp is so common. But there are many kinds of derp. Our lives are a minefield of derp. If our defenses against derp are weak, then we’re going to get things wrong. When we get things wrong, we are vulnerable to misjudgments that can lead to all sorts of trouble. Did you receive a phishing email and fall for the derp? Oops. There went your bank account. Did you drink bleach during the Covid lockdown? Oops. There went your esophagus, your stomach lining, and half of your intestines.

Epistemology — the philosophy of how we know things, how we discover new things, how we disprove things, and how we correct our errors — is very complex and very well developed. More than once in my life I’ve been accused of wanting to be right, as though that is an insult. Perhaps it’s thought to be an insult because wanting to be right is assumed to be about policing the errors of others. But that’s not it at all. It’s about applying good sense and skepticism to what we allow into our heads. It’s about making good decisions. It’s about not being prey in a world of derp. And yes, whether you want to call it policing or not, it’s also about saying that’s derp when confronted with derp.

I often read books that go over my head and that are more than I can understand. Usually, though, that’s worth the effort, because something can be gleaned. There are three subjects in particular about which I would like to know a great deal more but which are subjects that go over my head: physics, mathematics, and philosophy. The over-my-head book that was most recently on the nightstand is Of Two Minds: The Nature of Inquiry (James Blachowicz, State University of New York Press, 1998). I bought this book a while back because I’d come across references to the book which suggested that Blachowicz delivered a whipping or two to Karl Popper, whom many mongers of the smarter sort of derp take to be the last word in epistemology. I have learned the hard way that when someone is hectoring us with derp and makes a reference to Karl Popper, our derp detectors should light up.

Before, say, the days of cable television in the 1980s, it was fairly expensive to dispense derp. Historically people certainly found ways to do it. Pamphleteering, for example, which was often anonymous, is an important part of American and British history. But few people could afford the printing costs. But we now live in an era in which dispensing derp is nearly cost-free. It was cable television, for example, which brought us television preachers. The derp quickly created a lot of rich preachers. A decade later (1996), cable television brought us Fox News. When derp comes via email, we call it spam. And then came Facebook and all the other low-cost distributors of derp, derp, and more derp.

I think it’s unfortunately true these days that many people — if not most people — just don’t have the ability to defend themselves from derp. Some derp has become so sophisticated that having a Ph.D. is insufficient protection, at least where there are underlying susceptibilities. Some intelligence is required to detect derp, the more intelligence the better. Some education is required, the more the better. But character flaws also make people susceptible to derp — authoritarianism, narcissism, meanness and prejudice of every type, and (it’s a biggy) a craving for religion. Millions of people live in the trifecta of derp: They’re not very smart, they have weak educations, and they’re moral morons. Such people live in an alternate universe of purest derp, with just enough contact with a rational world to get in out of the rain.

I’ve hastily come up with a list of some categories of derp. If you’d like to add to the list, please leave a comment.

• Libertarian derp, with a hat tip to Krugman. There are well-funded think tanks that develop libertarian derp — for example, the Cato Institute. Billionaires and techno-utopians such as Elon Musk use the media to dispense libertarian derp.

• Right-wing derp. We’re utterly inundated with right-wing derp these days. It may be as close as your dinner table. Unless you’re off the grid or something, there is no escaping it.

• Centrist derp. The mainstream media are full of centrist derp. For publications such as The Atlantic, it’s a business model. Here I owe another hat tip to Paul Krugman, who I believe came up with the term “radical centrist.”

• Leftist derp. This is not nearly — not anywhere near — as common as centrist derp would have us believe. But it does exist. Think Glenn Greenwald or Jill Stein, the kind of leftists who are aligned with Russia.

• Religious derp. My personal epistemological view is that all religion is derp. But there are of course many religions and many degrees of religious derpiness.

• Marketing derp.

• Sucker derp. Think spam, phishing scams, pyramid schemes, and anyone who uses any form of derp to raise money.

• Doomer derp. You’d better buy your guns and ammo now to protect your family from the civil war that is going to start any minute. Trans athletes are going to groom our children and bring down the wrath of God on our once-great nation!

• Sentimental derp. Someday you, too, will find true love.

• Techno-utopian derp: Social media will bring us all together! Technology will save the planet! Artificial intelligence will save us from our ignorance! The meta world will be better than the real thing!

• Economic derp. Cutting taxes makes everyone better off and increases government revenue!

• Hero derp. I can’t stand the sight of Elon Musk, but he has millions of fan boys, most of whom, I’m pretty sure, also consume libertarian and techno-utopian derp.

• Distraction derp: Flood the zone with shit! Antifa did it! But her emails!

• Elitist derp: The New Yorker.

Part of the problem is that so many people love their derp. Without derp, their lives would be empty. And yet derp is the very thing that makes their lives so pathetic.

An 18th Century cooking show

Delicious has a remarkable 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was released in France in 2021 as Délicieux and is now available for streaming at Amazon Prime Video.

It’s set in 1789, just before the Revolution got violent. A duke’s chief cook, humiliated by the duke’s obnoxious dinner guests, leaves the duke’s household and returns to his family home, accompanied by his teen-age son. The place is a shambles. But as the cook recovers from his depression, he begins to cook again. Encouraged by his son and a mysterious visitor, he turns the place into an inn and stagecoach stop. Whether it’s historically accurate or not, the story is a parable about how fine cuisine — and dining out — became available to everyone, not just to a pampered and bored aristocracy.

Not only is Delicious visually beautiful, it’s a highly entertaining comedy.

Stories about bad people

From “The Pale Horse” (BBC / Amazon Prime Video). Boring.

Regular readers here know that there are certain kinds of stories that just don’t interest me. The largest category would be stories set in the here and now. But there’s another category as well: stories about bad people.

“The Pale Horse,” from BBC One (2020), now streamable from Amazon Prime Video, is that kind of story. The production is good, and the cast is excellent. It’s a nice period piece. But there is not a single character who is fit to like, with the exception of Clemency Ardingly, who has only a bit part. Even the detective is a bad guy — a bully. The men are jerks. The women are snarky and shallow. The witches glare and always look threatening.

People who are dysfunctional make similarly poor stories. The first example that comes to mind is “Trainspotting.” It was a popular film, but I stopped watching after about five minutes because the characters were so dysfunctional. Dysfunction is not interesting.

A story needs at least one character who is someone we can like. And then as long as there is at least one such character, bring on the villains.

Pity the poor witches

A Facebook meme

The day before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, there were stories in the media about an effort in the Scottish Parliament to pardon the thousands of witches who were burned at the stake in Scotland between between 1563 and 1736.

Earlier this year, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, had given a speech in which she said the victims were “accused and killed because they were poor, different, vulnerable or in many cases just because they were women.”

There are some interesting — and I think revealing — elements in the history of witch executions in Scotland. For one, there is evidence that Scotland executed five times as many witches per capita as other parts of Europe. For two, most of the witch-burnings occurred in the Lowlands of Scotland, not in the Highlands. Why might that be?

King James VI of Scotland (1566-1625) considered himself an expert on witchcraft. He wrote a book, Daemonologie. According to Wikipedia, “James personally supervised the torture of women accused of being witches.” Thus it was largely James VI who stirred up the witchcraft hysteria in Scotland. (James VI of Scotland later became James I of England. It is for this monster of a man for whom the King James translation of the Bible is named. They never tell the whole story in church.)

It was in the Lowlands of Scotland (Edinburgh and to the south of Edinburgh) where English-speaking Anglo-Saxons were concentrated, along with — of course — the influence of the church. But the Scottish Highlands remained largely pagan and Gaelic, and thus “witches” were respected — and needed — in the Highlands as wisewomen, herbalists, and healers.

This is yet another example of the moral differences between pagans and the people of the church. Because of the church’s claim to a patent on the moral high ground — one of the greatest frauds of Western civilization — the abiding superior wisdom of the pagans sometimes takes centuries to be acknowledged, which is why the Scottish Parliament is taking up the issue of witchcraft in the year 2022.

Even worse, though, than the church’s lack of moral wisdom — still with us today no less than in 1566 — is its eagerness for persecution and domination, even to the point of genocide. In the past I have written often about early Christianity’s genocides against the pagans of Europe. Canada today, and to a lesser degree the United States, is dealing with the church-state collusion and cruelty toward Native American children in the boarding schools that attempted to strip the children of their native culture — cultural genocide. Many children died in those schools. The Christian religion, like Islam, is a proselytizing religion that believes it has a mandate from God for domination of the world and of everyone in it. There is much we still don’t know about what Christian missionaries have done to powerless poor people all over the world.

There is a straight line, centuries long, from James VI of Scotland to the morally defective church people of today, especially those who are able to acquire and wield the power of the state in the service of their religion. Their purpose, still, is punishment and domination — for example, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett of the U.S. Supreme Court. Anyone who has seen the hatred and depravity flashing in the eyes of Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, or the almost soulless emptiness and stuntedness in the eyes of Amy Coney Barrett, can see that a concern for the unborn is not what motivates them. It is their lust for domination that motivates them. Or, to use Nicola Sturgeon’s words, their hatred for the poor, the different, and the vulnerable.

Much has changed over the centuries as the arc of justice moves on. To say that we don’t burn witches anymore is one of the ways we shed light on the idea of the arc of justice. But the minds of morally defective church people have not changed. They are authoritarians, and they continue to crave the legal right to be the cause of domination and punishment in whatever form they can get it. Donald Trump — their King Donald — emboldened them, empowered them, and let them loose. They are on our backs again. As always, women, children, and anyone who is different will pay most heavily. It remains to be seen how long it will take to throw them off our backs, especially given that the U.S. Constitution is so easily weaponized to block human progress.

My claim here is radical, but I believe it to be true. My claim is that authoritarians are not merely benignly different, with different views about what is good and what is wrong. My claim is that they are morally defective, and that they do vast harm and cause great misery in whatever century they live. They fight against the arc of justice because, in a just world, their lust for domination and persecution is thwarted.

“Visit to the Witch,” Edward Frederick Brewtnall, 1882

Fountain pens

What was I thinking? I don’t think I had owned a fountain pen since high school. I used to always have a fountain pen, though it always was an inexpensive one. Strangely enough, it was a practical rather than an aesthetic matter that led me to buy a fountain pen. It was that my roller-ball pens generally refuse to write when I try to sign a typewritten letter on good paper.

When I checked Amazon for fountain pens, I was greatly surprised to see a pen that looked quite decent for $12.99. It’s a Beiluner pen with a stainless steel body and gold nib. It can use either ink cartridges (it comes with six), or a reservoir that you can fill yourself from an ink bottle. It writes — no joke — more smoothly than the roller-ball pens I’ve been using. And those roller-ball pens aren’t cheap.

Nothing on the box or the printed material in the box says where the pen was made. Some sources say that Beiluner pens are made in Germany. I am skeptical that German pens of such quality can be sold so cheaply.

Typewriters and fountain pens are a natural (or at least retro) dyad.

Speaking of typewriters, here are some recent photos of Tom Hanks visiting a typewriter shop in Nashville.

Update: I retrieved the box from the recycling bin. The box (as opposed to the display case) clearly says that the pen was made in China.

A surprising new study on older drinkers

This is — no lie — the first martini I’ve ever made. Wine and ale suit me better.

Several European newspapers have had stories this week about a new German study which says that older people who are “heavy drinkers” are leaner, healthier, and have a better quality of life. Here’s a version of the story in a Scottish newspaper: “Heavy drinking over-60s have a better quality of life says new study.”

Is this too good to be true? This also comes along during a time in which I’ve been making an effort to drink less because of my age.

My guess is that — as doctors point out in the story — it’s not a causal relationship. That is, it’s not that drinking more causes older people to be leaner, healthier, and to have a better quality of life. Rather, it seems more likely that older people who are healthy, more sociable, and who are not fussbudget old prudes are likely to drink more, and it does them no harm. The story quotes the author of the study: “One explanation may be that higher alcohol consumption may lead to elevated mood, enhanced sociability and reduced stress.”

That makes a lot of sense to me. Now I think I’ll go make the first margarita I’ve ever made in my life, if that can be done with gin.

Update: Gin, lemon juice, and Cointreau, because that’s what I had. I don’t know if it was a margarita, but it was good.

The long, long culture war

Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Darrin M. McMahon. Oxford University Press, 2001. 262 pages.

Merely reading about the violent history of France is enough to get a case of PTSD. France, already damaged by the Protestant Reformation of the 16th Century, lurched from monarchy to revolution and then back again to monarchy. Though most of us are at least somewhat familiar with that history, what most of is did not know is that it was one long culture war, the very same culture war that we are still fighting today.

This culture war was between the Enlightenment — which then was new — and the mortal enemies of the Enlightenment, people on the right who have been with us since the Enlightenment’s beginnings. On the left was a new humanist philosophy that made no claim to being a divine revelation. Its roots were in reason. It was a European project, but this book limits itself to France, where the chief luminaries of the Enlightenment were men such as Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau.

Who were these mortal enemies of the Enlightenment? That can be answered accurately with a few words: the church and the authoritarian elite, but mostly the church. Most of the anti-philosophes, as this book calls them, were abbots and theologians. They saw Enlightenment philosophy as an evil conspiracy out to put an end to royalty and religion. In their minds, royalty and religion were the only forces capable of holding a society together. In France, their anti-Enlightenment evidence for this was the Reign of Terror after the 1789 revolution. These anti-philosophes were organized, and they produced a blizzard of books, tracts, and pamphlets to try to counteract the writings of the Enlightenment philosophes.

This old culture war, which raged white-hot from before the Revolution until the beginning of the Third Republic in 1870, was remarkably similar to the culture war through which we are living today. We could call it MFGA — Make France Great Again:

“…[T]he effort [was] to cleanse France of all trace of the Enlightenment and of the Revolution and to invest its inhabitants with a spiritual piety more intense than the eighteenth century had ever known. On the surface, this was a journey to the mythic past. But in truth the world that the men and women of the far Right aimed to create was not that of the ancien regime, the former regime. The world to which they hoped to return existed only in their minds.”

This book is above all a history of France, and McMahon has little to say about parallels with the present, which are obvious. He has little to say about the rest of Europe. I would venture to say that Britain handled the Enlightenment far better than France for two reasons: Henry VIII had conveniently gotten rid of the Catholic Church centuries before; and England’s royalty was more humane than France’s. McMahon does write, though, in describing how the enemies of the Enlightenment demonized their enemies: “Bequeathing an image of its enemy that long outlived it, the French Counter-Enlightenment, too, passed on a structure of opposition and a set of recurrent themes that would resurface in right-wing thought even to the present day.”

In America, the Enlightenment provided the basis for a new government and a new Constitution. But there were those in high places who hated the Enlightenment. McMahon mentions the Reverend Timothy Dwight, president of Yale from 1795 to 1817, who preached a sermon “in which he denounced the orchestrated plot, hatched by Voltaire, Frederick II, the Encyclopedists, and the Society of the Illuminati to destroy the Christian religion and the French monarchy.” That’s a conspiracy theory — from the president of Yale! According to Wikipedia, “Dwight was the leader of the evangelical New Divinity faction of Congregationalism — a group closely identified with Connecticut’s emerging commercial elite.”

Is there a traceable paper trail from then to now? I would say no. Rather, it’s that authoritarians and religionists never change. Their thought was just as ossified in the 18th Century as it is today. McMahon does mention, in his notes, a book from 1991 that I will read next: The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, which deals with how conservative forces have tried to prevent progress. McMahon also mentions the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), whom I first encountered during my student days and who is now back on my reading list.

McMahon quotes Whitehead: “The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.” Why that is so is easy enough to see. Those who abhor the ideas of reason, equality, and democracy will fight like hell against progress. They are baffled by how anyone could possibly want a world ruled by anyone other than preachers and kings.

Obi-Wan Kenobi

I had been eagerly awaiting this new Disney+ series. But after watching the first episode, I was disappointed. Ewan McGregor does his best, but he couldn’t make up for a ho-hum story and a ho-hum script.

Disney, I suspect, needs to try to please kids. That may not work very well for oldies like me who were already older than Luke Skywalker when we saw the first Star Wars film back in 1977. There is a young Princess Leia character in Obi-Wan Kenobi, age around seven, who is extremely annoying — miscast and cockily unaware of how bad her lines are. Maybe that will work for kids. Remember Jar Jar Binks, and the young Anakin and his pod race? The Star Wars franchise has always been weakest when it tried to be kid-friendly.

What we have, I’m afraid, is a first-string cast (Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen), but second-string writing and directing. Still, I’ll keep watching. The visuals on the planet Tattooine are superb. The music (some of which was written by John Williams) is excellent. And it is always fun to return to the Star Wars world, which, after 45 years, has become a kind of parallel universe.